As fate would have it I came across this article about backup’s lost. The Alaska Dept of Revenue spent over $200,000 and six weeks recreating data that was lost when a hard drive and backup hard drive were reformatted, and backup tapes were unreadable. Here’s the story: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/03/20/america/NA-GEN-US-Lost-Data.php Read the rest »
Backups – Part 1 (My Formative Years)
I seem to be slipping into a backup theme in pending posts, plus it’s time for me to adjust my backup strategy at home. So, I figured I’d write up my backup related history and biases. This is part 1, so that must mean there will at least be a part two. I’m hoping I don’t need a part 3, but we’ll see. In the beginning… Back in “the days of DOS” my backups consisted of floppy disks. (Remember those? And I don’t mean those smallish 3.5″ ones. I mean [...] Read the rest »
Parallels Desktop For Mac v2.5 – Build 3188
I had installed Parallels on my iMac back in early January but never got much beyond installing a copy of Windows Home Edition. That was build 1970 of Parallels 2.5. They released build 3188 back on March 7th. Since I had little invested in the current installation I figured I might as well upgrade. The worst case scenario was the time needed to re-install and potential Windows Activation issues if I did need to re-install. And if I ran out of time it could wait. I downloaded the update by [...] Read the rest »
iPhoto “Empty Trash” Crash Returns – Yet Another Fix
During the drought of blog postings I encountered the return of my problem with iPhoto, where it would crash whenever I emptied the trash, leaving empty icons behind. You can read about that experience here. I did the usual stuff, index and thumbnail rebuild,etc… without success, I did some web searches and came upon a new solution buried among several others. It fixed my problem immediately. All I had to do was go into iPhoto preferences and uncheck “Show item Counts” then I could empty the trash. I’m able to [...] Read the rest »
iClip 4 – A Nice Little Mac App
I had received a license for iClip with the Macheist bundle. It was beta at the time and I never got around to installing it. I was cleaning up old e-mails earlier this week and came across the e-mail from late January announcing the production release of version 4. It was time to download and install it. iClip is a clipboard manager and scrapbook. iClip runs like the dock, living at the top, bottom or sides of the screen, popping out as needed (optionally, it can always be visible). Out [...] Read the rest »
Configuring Thunderbird for AOL My eAddress
Here’s how to configure AOL My eAddress accounts in Thunderbird (at least what works for me). Version 1.5.0.10 is used for the screen shots. The rest of this post contains several screen shots and may take awhile to display, depending upon your connection. Read the rest »
Configuring Apple’s Mail.app for AOL My eAddress
Here’s how to configure AOL’s My eAddress accounts in Apple’s Mail.app (Well, at least what works for me). The rest of this post contains several screen shots and may take awhile to display, depending on your connection. Read the rest »
Mozy Mac Backup – Beta Arrives
[Updated 3/17 to reflect that the web download files are encrypted.] I’d asked to be notified by Mozy when they had a Mac client available, and earlier this week I got an e-mail from them that a beta was available. Although Apple’s Backup.app has done OK for me (all my test restores have worked but I’ve never truly needed it) it’s quirky, it’s backup methodology is limited and the lack of a verify concerns me. So I was happy to see another low cost backup solution becoming available for the [...] Read the rest »
Egads – Time Flies, Content Doesn’t
It’s been almost two months since I’ve added anything to this site. I knew it had been awhile but didn’t think it had been so long. The good news (for me) is I did dig into my Macs a off and on over the last couple of weeks so hopefully I’ll have something to write about soon. Mozy has a Mac client available for their online backup and I noticed a couple of comments about Thunderbird and AOL myAddress issues which I’ll try to tackle this weekend. Now on to [...] Read the rest »